to leave Hilbrook,--West Mallow, as it was then?"
he asked at last.

Ewbert was forced to own that he had heard a story, but he said, mainly
in Hilbrook's interest, that he had not paid much attention to it.

"Thought there wa'n't much in it? Well, that's right, generally
speakin'. Folks like to make up stories about a man that lives alone
like me, here; and they usually get in a disappointment. I ain't goin'
to go over it. I don't care any more about it now than if it had
happened to somebody else; but it did happen. Josiah got the girl, and I
didn't. I presume they like to make out that I've grieved over it ever
since. Sho! It's forty years since I gave it a thought, that way." A
certain contemptuous indignation supplanted the wonted gentleness of the
old man, as if he spurned the notion of such sentimental folly. "I've
read of folks mournin' all their lives through, and in their old age
goin' back to a thing like that, as if it still meant somethin'. But it
ain't true; I don't suppose I care any more for losin' her now than
Josiah would for gettin' her if he was alive. It did make a difference
for a while; I ain't goin' to deny that. It lasted me four or five
years, in all, I guess; but I was married to somebody else when I went
to the war,"--Ewbert controlled a start of surprise; he had always taken
it for granted that Hilbrook was a bachelor,--"and we had one child. So
you may say that I was well over that first thing. _It wore out_; and if
it wa'n't that it makes me mad to have folks believin' that I'm
sufferin' from it yet, I presume I shouldn't think of it from one year's
end to another. My wife and I always got on well together; she was a
good woman. She died when I was away at the war, and the little boy died
after I got back. I was sorry to lose her, and I thought losin' _him_
would kill me. It didn't. It appeared one while as if I couldn't live
without him, and I was always contrivin' how I should meet up with him
somewhere else. I couldn't figure it out."

Hilbrook stopped, and swallowed dryly. Ewbert noticed how he had dropped
more and more into the vernacular, in these reminiscences; in their
controversies he had used the language of books and had spoken like a
cultivated man, but now he was simply and touchingly rustic.

"Well," he resumed, "that wore out, too. I went into business, and I
made money and I lost it. I went through all that experience, and I got
enough of it, just as I got enough of figh